Sleep is supposed to be a place of rest, but Parasomnia is built around the frightening reality that closing your eyes also means surrendering control. For filmmaker James Ross II, that fear did not begin with a horror movie. It began with stories from his mother about the shadow people she would see while sleeping, experiences he later recognized as sleep paralysis before eventually experiencing them himself.
In our conversation with Ross and star Jasmine Mathews, the pair broke down the personal origins of Shudder’s psychological horror film, Riley’s complicated relationship with trauma and control, authentic Black representation in horror, and the challenge of translating night terrors into something cinematic. Mathews also revealed that she had only three days to prepare for the emotionally and physically demanding lead role.
Parasomnia follows Riley, a young woman tormented by night terrors and unresolved tragedy. When her best friend becomes the latest person to disappear, Riley begins to suspect that the demonic figure haunting her sleep may have crossed into the waking world.
Sleep Paralysis Turned a Family Story Into Parasomnia
Ross grew up hearing his mother describe the “shadow people” she encountered in her sleep. At the time, neither fully understood what was happening. Once Ross began experiencing sleep paralysis himself, those stories suddenly took on a much more tangible meaning.
Rather than opening his eyes during an episode, Ross remembers deciding that remaining in darkness was preferable to discovering what his mind might place in the room with him. That experience made him reconsider something nearly everyone does without much thought: sleep requires us to become completely vulnerable.
“When you go to sleep at night, you don’t know what’s going on in the outside world,” Ross explained. “You’re also vulnerable to what’s going on inside of your own head.”
That realization became the foundation for Parasomnia. Ross began asking two deceptively simple questions: What is the scariest thing someone could wake up to, and what is the scariest thing that could happen while their eyes remain closed? Riley’s nightmare was created by bringing those fears together and forcing one character to confront both.
Jasmine Mathews Found Riley Through Trauma and Control
For Mathews, Riley’s fear could not simply be about the supernatural entity tormenting her. The character enters the story already carrying enormous unresolved trauma, and Mathews saw her obsession with control as the defense mechanism she has built to survive it.
“I viewed Riley as someone who has gone through an immense amount of trauma, and in order to protect herself, she has developed this obsessive relationship with control to keep herself safe,” Mathews said.
That became especially important because Mathews had only three days to prepare for the role. Instead of attempting to manufacture an elaborate process in such a short window, she trusted Ross, the material, and her own instincts. Mathews distilled Riley down to a woman who had “confused control with healing,” believing that if she could contain every part of her life, she could prevent herself and the people she loves from being hurt again.
The limited preparation may have ultimately helped. Mathews believes additional time could have led her to overthink the performance rather than experience Riley’s unraveling moment by moment. One emotionally intense scene on a dock became particularly personal, with Mathews drawing from someone in her own life and finding an unexpected sense of release through Riley’s emotions.
Black Women, Strength and the Freedom to Fall Apart
Mathews also found another dimension to Riley through her own experience as a Black woman. Horror protagonists are often praised for resilience, but Parasomnia gave her an opportunity to question what that strength actually means when someone has spent years refusing to become vulnerable.
“There was a difference between being strong because you have to be and being strong because you’ve never felt safe enough to fall apart,” Mathews explained. For Riley, the journey becomes partly about discovering that “vulnerability is not the opposite of strength.”
That idea connects naturally to the film’s approach to Black representation. Ross wanted his characters’ personalities and reactions to feel culturally authentic without turning their Blackness into something the screenplay constantly needed to explain. Mathews praised that choice, noting the important tradition of horror being used to examine race while arguing that progress also means allowing Black characters access to every type of story.
“Our stories don’t always have to explain Blackness in order to center Black people,” Mathews said. “We get to be the complicated human beings that we are.”
James Ross II Likes Punishing the Smart Horror Characters
Parasomnia also plays with one of the genre’s oldest audience traditions: screaming at characters for making terrible decisions.
Ross knows horror audiences are conditioned to believe they would survive because they would recognize the warning signs, leave the haunted location, or make the rational choice. His response is simple: doing everything correctly should not guarantee survival.
A lot of times horror movies punish the dumb characters. I like punishing the smart characters,” Ross said. “I like it when the character that does the right thing ends up being the one who gets in trouble.”
It is a deceptively effective approach because it removes one of the safety nets between the viewer and the movie. If a character can recognize the danger, make the same decision an audience member would make, and still end up in trouble, suddenly yelling advice at the screen doesn’t feel nearly as comforting.
Turning a Night Terror Into Something Cinematic
The visual language of Parasomnia presented Ross with another challenge. Sleep paralysis and night terrors are intensely subjective experiences, meaning the film needed to create something audiences could understand emotionally without simply treating its dream sequences like conventional nightmares.
Ross worked with his filmmaking team to create labyrinth-like spaces, low-light imagery, entity perspectives, and surreal sequences designed around the fragmented nature of night terrors. He was particularly interested in the strange reality that someone can experience something terrifying while asleep and wake with little or no memory of what happened.
“How can I make something and put it in a character’s head that was so horrific that their brain literally just dumps it out as soon as they wake up?” Ross recalled asking.
Those sequences were not created purely for visual experimentation. Riley’s subconscious, personal history, and clues to what she is experiencing are embedded throughout them, allowing the nightmare imagery to remain connected to her character rather than becoming detached horror set pieces.
Could Parasomnia Continue?
Ross built rules around the supernatural world of Parasomnia, but he emphasized that those rules exist first and foremost to serve Riley. The film was not designed simply as mythology waiting to become a franchise.
“This movie is her,” Ross said. “The rules in the world were created to serve her story.”
That does not mean the door is closed. If there are more chapters worth telling and audiences respond to the film, Ross acknowledged that there are still places the story could go. Considering how deeply Riley’s trauma, trust, and vulnerability are connected to the horrors surrounding her, any continuation would seemingly need to remain rooted in her rather than simply finding another victim for the mythology.
That character-first approach is ultimately what makes the ideas behind Parasomnia compelling. The supernatural horror begins with sleep paralysis, shadow people, and the frightening things that might be waiting in the darkness, but Ross and Mathews are equally interested in a more familiar fear: what happens when the things we use to make ourselves feel safe can no longer protect us?
Written and directed by James Ross II, Parasomnia stars Jasmine Mathews, RJ Brown, Sally Stewart, Stephen Barrington, Danny Brown, and Simon Longnight.
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